Brexit undoubtedly represents a crisis of the European Union, despite its leaders’ attempts to deny this, or even to present Britain’s departure as a moment of renewal and reinvigoration. But crises have the advantage of revealing the essential structures of a formation, and can offer X-ray vision of the antagonisms that constitute them. This is true in a fundamental sense of Brexit, since one of the main driving forces of the British vote to leave the EU – the potentially fatal tension between national sovereignty and the project of European integration – is inherent in that project.

It is important to emphasise that this tension is only potentially fatal. Indeed, as Alan Milward has shown in The European Rescue of the Nation State (a fundamental work largely ignored by the mediocrities of academic EU integration studies), the initial formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) allowed a reinvigoration of the West European nation states by providing a transnational framework of regulated trade that facilitated the realisation of a Keynesian welfare regime.